A Violin Singing Alone in the Darkness
by Lady Heliotrope
Summary: This is the first time ever that John's spent a night away from Baker Street. Sherlock encounters himself and is vulnerable. Oneshot. Post-RB. Angst.


_Sunshine..._

Sherlock unfurled his limbs and rose from the couch, like a flower bending down its petals to meet the morning. He cast a painful grimace at his neglected violin and padded across the room. The window was open to hear the sounds of the street, and he was disappointed to see the heavy gray sky when he pulled back the curtains.

The sunshine this morning wasn't much sunshine at all. It was cold, sterile, begrudging, as if Apollo had been mistreating his exhausted horses the day after a bleak journey to the underworld and back.

In any case, the sunshine wasn't helping him.

Then again, not much else could.

The night before, Sherlock had worshipped the moonlight.

He'd waited a decent and appropriate amount of time before texting John with a curt "how is your date?"

He'd kept his temper when he only received a reluctant "good" in reply.

He'd ignored the dinner that John diligently put in a plastic bag and left in the 'fridge, because it was the only way he could spite John in his absence.

Oh, no, wait a moment - he'd almost forgot that secret package of cigarettes.

He'd enjoyed them in an unsurpassed nicotine binge on the doorstep, the entire pack, looking like a bum in his housecoat and bare feet but not caring, and trying to feel nothing but the cold.

He'd watched the smoke curl upwards and caress the big, splendid, glowing moon, clouds and smoke becoming indistinguishable parts of the same gauzy fabric that surrounded the precious orbiting stone.

If John were around, he would practice his music like the glorious flower he was, but the night had fallen and John was not here, and John was the best conductor of light to be had in the darkness. The violin did not respond well without sunshine.

He'd watched the Friday night revelers struggle back to their homes, laughing shrilly and staring agape at him when they passed, too drunk to realize how rude they were.

He'd laughed silently back at them until he realized what he was doing, and why, and decided that their laughter was perhaps deserved.

Who else would sit and curse direct orders from his most patient supporter to avoid the things that were killing him?

The moon was laughing at him, too; Artemis knew the value of trickery in her hunts, and her golden-horned deer were unafraid of drawing her through the mist off the Thames as she unerringly pointed her arrow at him. Accusing him - how dare he reject his music? Her arrow and bow challenged him to draw up his own bow and create a sweet, gentle, dark, complex melody on his instrument. He could pierce her heart more effectively with music than she could with her weapon.

So he'd stamped out the remainder of that last cigarette on the pavement and gone back inside, upstairs, retiring to his flower-box once more.

But the moonlight became more intimidating as he got closer to it in height. He'd sat on the windowsill, staring up at the moon that jeered his cowardice and dared him to slip and fall. He'd texted John again, asking how he was.

He'd got a simple reply:

"Fine. Good dinner. Won't be back till late."

Then, a few minutes later.

"Never mind. Won't be back tonight. ;)"

If it hadn't had the damned winky-smiley, as chipper and mysterious and mischievous and cruel as Puck, Sherlock might have been able to spend the night without cracking.

But as he looked upon the semicolon and parentheses that struck his most sensitive nerve, a few teardrops escaped the petals of his eyelids.

_I ache for the sunshine. I ache for it. I ache for it. I ache for it. I'm so cold, brittle, lost in the darkness, and alone..._

The sadness quickly became anger, but only because anger was more acceptable than real _feelings_.

It was even worse because he'd been steeling himself for this circumstance for months.

He'd been telling himself over and over that it was _all fine._ It was the natural course of things. John would eventually find a girl he liked enough to spend the night with. Moreover, this was not only a natural course of events, but permissible: John had every right to spend a night out.

Sherlock hated the idea of restricting John in any particular, most of all _sex_.

Of course it wasn't as if John hadn't had sex with any of his girlfriends just because he'd never spent a night out before. John had to get his sunshine from someplace, hadn't he? While he didn't kiss and tell, upon his return Sherlock knew exactly how far John'd got with his date. It really was written all over him in the most disconcerting of manners.

Disconcerting perhaps because maybe John didn't care if Sherlock knew what had happened. John didn't care enough about what Sherlock thought to hide anything.

So Sherlock wasn't worried about the _sex _bit as a general rule. But it was different somehow if it was sex that kept John away all night

If John's pursuit of sex kept him from Baker Street for any significant duration of time, Sherlock felt he might as well go unnoticed.

Sherlock, as it happened, spent a lot of his time trying to ensure that he didn't go unnoticed. But as much as John lauded him, he wasn't sure that John actually _did_ notice. Or, again, maybe it was more a matter of John _not caring._

The sunshine would be back in the morning, Sherlock reminded himself steadily. The night would be over, both metaphorically and literally, and John would have an awkward waking-up moment in the same bed as the woman he'd had sex with the night before, and he'd shower and dress in his day-old clothes and hurry back to Baker Street early to shower and dress for the day. The sun would shine in the morning, and the day would be beautiful and golden with its glow, and he would take up his violin and play a song without words to express his joy that John was back.

This anticipation didn't make him forget the fact that ultimately, in mentally preparing for this night, he had been hoping that he wouldn't care.

Now that he knew that he did... was he getting soft in the head, ordinary, useless?

He kneeled at the window, almost in an attempt to supplicate the gods, and ached with not knowing what was going on in John's world.

A moth clutched against the grime of the window sill with waterlogged wings, and Sherlock wished for the sun to rise and dry them, wishing too that the sun would go through to the dark ugly seeds inside him and soften them white.

It was a pitiful thing, to try and justify one's own desires and anxieties by advocating for the cause of another.

The celestial gods were not fooled, and Mercury took a few steps farther away from the Baker Street clocks so they ticked ever slower. All the while, the heavy, solemn moon beamed upon him with the warm silver smile of a midwife grown tired of her demanding client. Impregnating someone with inspiration was easy enough work, but drawing forth the result through labor was another.

Artemis was smiling, though, not looking on sternly, and Sherlock knew he had best ride this one out. It wasn't his place to bother John at this time. The sun had to set once a day, after all, and while the moon was an unfulfilling substitute, that was not its own fault.

By virtue of this thought he resisted texting John further, aside from 'have a good night.'

Then Sherlock wished, wished, wished that John would read something more in those four little words, because there was much more written between them, but if John couldn't see them without prompting, perhaps he didn't deserve to see them. Sherlock was the man in the cave, and if John wouldn't bring him light there so that Sherlock could play his violin, then Sherlock would die in the dark and silence, alone but his dignity intact.

He let the waterlogged moth climb onto his finger, and he placed it gently on the scroll of his violin. Perhaps the gesture would please the gods that looked upon him so cruelly today.

Oh - there was another package of emergency cigarettes.

Sherlock smoked, smoked, smoked at the open window and curled his toes against the cold and tried to feel like the world had something to offer him.

He'd been waiting for this night for many months, ever since John had started dating again. And he'd been planning how to cope with it ever since he realized that he found John's dating personally problematic.

That didn't make encountering the reality of his current situation any easier. In fact it made him feel more worthless to understand that he'd tried to prepare adequately for this contingency because it was clear that he hadn't prepared _enough_.

He hadn't cultivated his inner garden enough that it could survive this particular storm without the sun.

Now he looked at the ruins of the roses he was beginning to grow in his Mind Palace, grafts from John's own inner bountiful bushes. He felt depressed that the vegetables and poisonous flora that grew so well in the Mind Palace were so lonely-looking in their greens and browns.

His whole Mind Palace could use the touch of cleansing, warm sunshine. Not just in the bursts that John provided on a daily basis, as part of a running dialogue of grumpy bickering and laughs and genuine comradeship.

He mused on what he'd permit John to do to his body - what would _need_ John to do to his body - to get such a task accomplished as spring cleaning of the Mind Palace, and of his soul locked deeply inside it.

Some beautiful music was archived there, quivering and alive and waiting to spring out of its confines, like plump white moonlike bosoms in a tight corset eager to breathe the air of liberty. All that was needed was the gentle sunshine kiss of a prince to awaken the eyes of the sleeping beauty.

Dreaming of Tchaikovsky and lilacs, Sherlock dozed with his head against the window frame, but returned to wakefulness at the sound of cars going down the street.

The noise of their purring engines reverberated against the cloudy sky, cut through the thick atmosphere, and traveled through the high-walled corridor that was Baker Street. Sherlock thought it sounded like the ocean, or perhaps fallen angels, with hoarse voices that ebbed and flowed like the tide, faint and melancholy and mournful and earth-bound, silent and invisible creatures crawling in the shadows, infectious and contentious and angry, simply angry.

They would be willing to do anything to get a devilish youth like Sherlock on their side, to tempt him into breaking his promises and trap him in the snares of his own superior mind.

It was only them that made him think of death at that moment as he looked at the moonlight that still challenged him to let his heart blossom in the darkness and practice his violin. He told himself he was bored of it and allowed himself to hate everything around him, and he cast the evil eye on all the furniture, and his instrument in its open case.

The spirits were sinister and cruel who reminded him of the beauty of a high that he had experienced that _first time_ using. That first time he'd opened himself to the world in all his youthful vulnerability.

And now he vowed against seeking it, usually because of John, who was the most compelling reason to do anything worthwhile these days. John was the sunshine, and most flowers only opened in the presence of sunshine, which affected their biophysical rhythms.

But John wasn't here right now and...

Sherlock dared not complete the thought.

The sunshine, he begged to remind himself, remember that the sunshine will come in the morning. With it, the bees will rise, somewhere out in the country, since bees were an infrequent sight in London even in the clearer air of the 21st century city.

Bees were phallic-looking creatures, symbolic of life, mediators between the worlds of death and life, eternally playing a vital role in the promotion of the human race. They bore the pollen that made the flowers pregnant and fertile. They burrowed their heads inside the petals they adored and made love to the flower, gently and awkwardly.

It was only a fleeting gesture, ravishing the virgin flower, but once this had taken place, most of the work of reproduction had been done, and all that was left was for the flower to wilt and age and sink under the burden of a heavy fruit or seed pouch and slowly let it drop.

No, it was no mystery to him why bees fascinated Sherlock so much - bees were soldiers in the most beautiful and tragic romance Sherlock could imagine, the flowers were the homebound virgins who encountered the bees as they traveled, and they never resented the bees' flirtations but instead cherished the seeds left by their visitors.

The feminine flowers lived their whole lives just for this one encounter with the masculine bee, and they had filled their highest purpose when their duty by nature was done.

Also, bees were phallic-looking creatures. Sherlock had made that connection a long time ago, spending hours in his yard at home, watching the insects, and avoiding Mycroft's terse hypocrisy.

John, ever the busy worker-bee himself, would join him in the glory that was a beautiful sunshining morning, getting ready to collect pollen from his usual favorite flowers - the clinic, the hospital, Tesco's - and in his fuzzy, warm, striped, golden-haired self, Sherlock would find comfort. He would solicit honey from John, as he always did, in the forms of attention, praise, and acceptance. Sometimes, on occasions, touch. And he would join John's buzzing joyfully with the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, because he was a multitalented flower with a sense of humor.

Then again, it was unfair of him to believe himself a mere flower, given how much of John's time he monopolized. Sherlock knew he was actually a hyperdramatic Queen Bee, but in this position of authority and command he was deeply aware of his vulnerability. He mostly survived because of the strength of John's efforts, convictions, and ministrations, not his own. He flailed when he tried to function as an ordinary human being. The wings he bore were not strong enough to bear his body.

So he withdrew from the window where the moon continued to laugh at him, from beneath a veil of clouds and fog, and soon all he could see was the shine of it on the wooden floor as he collapsed on his couch. It also reflected against his violin-strings.

He wasn't going to sleep, but he wasn't going to stay fully awake, either.

There were no drugs in the flat, but sure as hell there was alcohol.

So he only noticed the morning had come when the sun had been up for an hour. Mostly, he thought as he looked out the window again into the gray of the street below, because the sunshine was of underwhelming vibrancy this morning.

Indeed, the morning sunshine was cold, brittle, astringent, annoyed, and unwilling to talk to him.

Sherlock mourned the difference between the ideals he sought and the reality he faced.

_Sunshine. Beautiful sunshine. __Sunshine is cold when it is forced._

It was no more healthy in color than florescent lighting in St. Bart's lab. He cursed himself - he would have been more productive spending his night there.

And then he heard a taxi, and he quickly closed the window and pulled the curtains and went back to the couch and threw a folded blanket over himself so that John wouldn't know that Sherlock'd noticed John's return.

The door opened, and against it Sherlock shuddered involuntarily at the cold draft from the hallway. The sunshine was indeed accompanied by the feeling of winter. Sherlock's muscles tensed against it like petals against a storm.

"You up?" asked John, and Sherlock didn't stir, but his eyes were open and wet against the brocade of the couch. John took this as a signal to enter the bathroom without further words, and Sherlock closed his eyes and breathed deeply, firmly, and desperately, his breath warming the cool fabric against which he pressed his face.

But then - lo!- a flutter of movement caught his peripheral vision, and he tipped his head up to see that the clouds had parted very briefly, giving an encouraging smile of light that shone directly on his violin. This blush of gold set the moth, wings now dry, fluttering across the room.

Sherlock wasn't about to miss cues when he saw them, and he got up, very quietly, and picked up his violin.

It was time to lure the sunshine towards his petals with a song.

* * *

In other news, I've started a Sherlock Memes page on facebook and tumblr. Search for Sherlock Memes in Facebook under 'Pages' and search for Lady Heliotrope on Tumblr. I suggest you take a peek not because they're particularly brilliant pieces of work, but because I wish to invite you to enjoy my less serious efforts, which I spend a little time on.

Thanks for reading, do review please! YAY FOR THE PREMIERE TONIGHT!


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